Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I've also heard that entrepreneurial thing. I think just basically the entrepreneurial skill set, it's like making difficult things happen and like building coalitions of people and like setting up systems. And these are just super valuable skills everywhere. And yeah, I think the key filter would just be like, could you actually hack this or would you find it too frustrating? But if in doubt, I would say to try it. You might, I think people have a lot of misconceptions about, they see careers in a very picture book vision of it. Maybe they picture the DMV or something when they think of like the government like, but there's so many different organizations and teams and maybe you find some that you are really aligned with and it's a very different experience working with them. But yeah, also in government there's a lot of need for more just like analysis, technical expert type roles, which again, can fit people who are a bit more like nerdy or researchery type people who want to do something more applied where they can actually see the effects of their actions compared to academia. That can also be a really good profile for that type of person. And then, yeah, the kind of just like operational, getting stuff done skills as well, really, I think as far as I can tell, really needed there as well. And also all the other orgs as well also need that skill set. How do you think about joining versus starting? Obviously, this is somewhat of a timeline question, but I've heard both points of view recently, both being like, we still have a lot of gaps where we need somebody to step up and start a new organization. And so if that could be you, should do it. And then on the other hand, I've also heard there's a lot of orgs that are trying to hire and there's not enough talent to go around. I would say my subjective sense right now of the AI nonprofit space is, and obviously there will be exceptions to this, I don't mean to pay with too broad of a rush, and you can also feel free to disagree. But it seems to me like there's a lot of funding available for organizations that can demonstrate that they're executing reasonably well and have any capacity to scale. So what are your thoughts or how would you talk people through the starting versus joining decision point. Yeah, there definitely is funding available. It's a difficult thing to think about in a way because more funding is still helpful because there's always like more you can do. But I think it is true that if you show up with a really good organization, you can raise a lot quite quickly. And in the past, Coefficient Giving was responsible for a lot of funding, but that's really actually brought in now. In the last couple of years, there's a lot of new funders entering the space. And there might be a lot more funders if some of the people who've made money from Anthropic start donating, which they have pledged. The founders of Anthropic have all pledged 80% of their equity, I think it is, to donate eventually.…

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